All posts for the month July, 2010

I’d like to preface this post with an acknowledgement that on a personal level, I’m quite lucky, as unlike a lot of people who are currently unemployed, I have part-time work for the fall available for the asking, from people who would be very happy to see me doing it. That said, I’d say that employment agencies are probably best avoided at the moment unless it’s for specialist work, as they’re so overwhelmed that I actually received, get this…

Pop-Sci is all a-gaggle at a vest using shear fluids to support kevlar.

BUT:

In the tests, BAE scientists used a gas gun to fire ball-bearing bullets at nearly 1,000 feet per second at two test materials — 31 layers of regular Kevlar and 10 layers of Kevlar combined with the shear-thickening liquid.

The shear-thickening liquid stopped the bullets more quickly and prevented them from penetrating as deeply, the BBC says. British media got a preview of the materials at a BAE facility in Bristol, England.

The part that should be making people scratch their heads is “ball-bearing bullets.” Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over. Spherical projectiles have terrible ballistics and awful penetration. That’s why bullets, shotgun pellets aside, are ogival penetrators, not spherical ones. So the million-dollar, or, Pound, question, as the case may be is, why is BAE having to resort to a test that will at best be realistic regarding certain types of notoriously sub-par 1950s communist ammunition?